Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s

Abstract

Erin D. Chapman's Prove It on Me illuminates the complexities of the New Negro era by refusing to simplify the forces shaping black life in the United States. There is no easy conclusion about how liberating or confining modern discourses were, so Chapman resists one-dimensional arguments. She uses a distinctly black feminist approach, but while concerned with how rarely black women's ideas and experiences have been fully understood, she does not examine them in isolation. The result is a nuanced account of how strategies for asserting African American citizenship often empowered black men at the expense of black women and of how mainstream media limited recognition of black women's humanity. In the process, readers come to appreciate that different strategies might have yielded broader freedom for both men and women. Indeed, though many understand the black power movement to have diverged from the tactics of the New Negro era, Chapman's analysis illuminates a masculinist orientation in 1920s ideology that was largely unaltered in later decades.